Winter landscapes (Nikon only)

Two things really make this landscape stand out: the gorgeous pink clouds catch the eye from any distance, while the church perched neatly on a foreground hill and backed helpfully by some blank cloud gives the scene a sense of scale when the photo is looked at more closely. The sheer size of mountains can easily be lost when there's nothing in the frame to compare them to, so that one little feature makes everything behind it all the more awe-inspiring.

The judges loved this shot. The winter sky and snow are present, yet their colour and absence of detail makes them seem more like an absence, so when you look at the picture all that really stands out is the row of huts plus one sharply-caught cyclist. It was also good that the photographer had the courage to leave plenty of white in the frame, trusting to the colour and detail across the centre to pull in the viewer's attention.

The light was what the judges really loved about this photo: not just the way the sun is peeking over the horizon, but the gorgeous flare around it, which helps to pull your eye towards the brightest part of the image. The trees help break up the horizon, and the texture of the trees and rocks is perfectly balanced against the mostly-smooth snow, while colour shifts in the snow and sky prevent those areas from looking flat. A beautifully composed shot.

Winter doesn't always equal heavy snowfall, and that's the case here where there's just a scattering on the shadow-side of the hills. However, lack of snow doesn't matter, because this shot is all about the way that golden, low winter light hits the landscape, bringing out the interlocking hillsides and backlighting the frosted vegetation. The clearly defined plants from the very foreground back help to give a sense of scale to the scene, and mean there's interest in every part of the image.

Snow can be flat and blank, creating negative space in a shot, or it can, like the snow here, be full of texture and interest. In fact, the whole image is full of texture, from the snow that curves round and draws your eye into the frame, to the icy surface of the water, to the dappled clouds – and that gorgeous low light rakes across it all and brings out the shapes. The sun also adds a blaze of warm colour, which contrasts beautifully with the bluish snow.

You may think this photo looks familiar – and so you should, as it also made the top 10 in our 'monochrome'-themed contest back in July. But a good photo is a good photo, and the stark shape of the crossroads drawing your eye to the corners of the image, and the compact square of the house and trees around it adding an extra, angled shape, make as impressive a shot on a 'winter landscape' theme as they did on a 'monochrome' one.

This is one of those landscapes that you see more detail in, and more clever compositional touches, the more you look at it. The immediate foreground and the sky behind the tombstone-like peak marker are dark and cold. The foreground is also where the only snow in the picture is seen – so your eye moves on to the seemingly warm peaks in the background with deceptively blue sky above. The whole scene is beautifully sharp and detailed. A classic winter landscape.

This is such a clever shot. At first glance, it looks like the leafless winter trees have been mirrored in negative, but a closer look reveals that the dark branches of the trees against the sky are actually balanced by dead reeds against dark pondside soil – stripping out the colour has added to the effect, removing any colour difference from the trees and reeds that might spoil the illusion. Removing the colour also gives the scene an icy quality that it, being snow-free, would otherwise lack.